Friday, August 23, 2019

One More Quiet Weekend

TigerBlog spent a little time going through Google analytics yesterday and learned some interesting things, as always.

In the last 12 months, there have been 111 pages on goprincetontigers.com that have been viewed at least 10,000 times. That's pages, so it includes things like clicking on, say, the composite schedule or the main football page.

There were 202 pages that were viewed at least 5,000 times. There were 927 that were viewed at least 1,000 times, which would have been 928 if one more person had looked at the football roster.

For pages that were viewed at least 100 times, the number is 2,336. That's a lot, no?

The most viewed actual story of the last 12 months? And the most viewed game story? Any guesses?

TB played this game with bios a few months ago. When he went back to look, he saw that there were two Princeton athletes whose bios were viewed at least 10,000 times. Those two are wrestler Patrick Glory (10,237) and men's lacrosse player Michael Sowers (10,190).

The top five athlete bios were those two, followed by John Lovett (not surprising), Bella Alarie (also not surprising) and Patrick Brucki (also not surprising). Matthew Kolodzik was sixth, leaving three wrestlers in the top six.

By the way, there were 341 athletes whose bios were viewed at least 1,000 times.

Oh, and the answers to the questions TB asked are the story when Carla Berube was hired as head women's basketball coach (9,453) and the Princeton's win over Penn to finish its first perfect football season in 54 years (4,517).

Anyway, that's some fun with analytics.

What else do you want for today? It's the end of the quiet times.

Welcome to the last weekend without a Princeton athletic event for quite awhile. In fact, you're going to have to go all the way until January and the break for first semester exams to find another weekend that will have an empty schedule.

TigerBlog has spent his entire career, dating back in fact to when he was still in college, working on weekends. He has never, ever had a job where he had to be there at 9 and worked until 5, with an hour for lunch, Monday through Friday.

He doesn't know any different. There have been time where he's wondered what that would actually be like. He's even asked his friends who work what would be considered more traditional hours how that works, and he can't really imagine it.

There are games to cover, and they are played on the weekends for the most part. It's just how it is.

Princeton averages around 700 athletic events per year. That's a lot of events, with a lot of moving parts.

More than half of those are played away from Princeton, requiring buses or planes, hotels, meals and everything like that. The ones that are played at Princeton require all kinds of other things, like refs, facilities, fans, stats and everything like that.

TB has told this story before, but when he first started out in the newspaper business (that was nearly 40 years ago already), he always said he'd do it for one more year and then get a "real" job. Then one year folded into another and another, and each time one began, he said the same thing. One more year, and then a real job.

Anyway, he's still doing it.

When any new year rolls around, there's always a sense of the excitement that comes with working in athletics. If that ever goes, you know you're in the wrong profession.

Event No. 1 for 2019-20 will be a women's soccer game a week from today at St. Joe's, followed two days later by the first home event of the year, against Boston College. That game a week from Sunday will be played on Sept. 1.

September?

Speaking of September, there will be 50 Princeton athletic events in the month. Yeah, there's no real easing into anything.

So enjoy the last weekend for awhile without any Princeton games. Do summer things.

After all, the next time there's one of these, it figures to be a lot colder.

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